To talk about the way in which sound was used to place viewers on Arrakis and in the world of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, the Warner Bros. film’s veteran sound team is featured in a new episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Behind the Screen.
The guests are supervising sound editors/designers Mark Mangini and Theo Green and re-recording mixers Doug Hemphill and Ron Bartlett.
Green relates that as part of the work, the team went to Death Valley to record sound, “sticking all kinds of microphones and hydrophones deep under the sand whilst recording above the sand at the same time, so that we could kind of shift our perspective and create this sound, that sounds kind of like a drum skin.”
“[Dune author] Frank Herbert had described in the book, and it was an important part of the script, that if you stand on the wrong kind of sand on Arrakis, it’s so resonant that it’s like a drum and they call it drum sand,” he continues. “That basically called the [sandworms]. The sound of resonating sand is like a lure to the sandworms.”
This team was Oscar nominated for Villeneuve’s prior film, Blade Runner 2049. Mangini previously won an Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road and Hemphill for The Last of the Mohicans.
